Athens: Its Rise and Fall | Page 8

startling and ingenious, not only substitute
no unanswerable hypothesis, but conduce to no important result. [17]
VI. If Cecrops were really the leader of an Egyptian colony, it is more
than probable that he obtained the possession of Attica by other means
than those of force. To savage and barbarous tribes, the first appearance
of men, whose mechanical inventions, whose superior knowledge of
the arts of life--nay, whose exterior advantages of garb and mien [18]
indicate intellectual eminence, till then neither known nor imagined,
presents a something preternatural and divine. The imagination of the
wild inhabitants is seduced, their superstitions aroused, and they yield
to a teacher--not succumb to an invader. It was probably thus, then, that
Cecrops with his colonists would have occupied the Attic
plain--conciliated rather than subdued the inhabitants, and united in
himself the twofold authority exercised by primeval chiefs--the dignity
of the legislator, and the sanctity of the priest. It is evident that none of
the foreign settlers brought with them a numerous band. The traditions

speak of them with gratitude as civilizers, not with hatred as conquerors.
And they did not leave any traces in the establishment of their
language:--a proof of the paucity of their numbers, and the gentle
nature of their influence--the Phoenician Cadmus, the Egyptian
Cecrops, the Phrygian Pelops, introduced no separate and alien tongue.
Assisting to civilize the Greeks, they then became Greeks; their
posterity merged and lost amid the native population.
VII. Perhaps, in all countries, the first step to social improvement is in
the institution of marriage, and the second is the formation of cities. As
Menes in Egypt, as Fohi in China, so Cecrops at Athens is said first to
have reduced into sacred limits the irregular intercourse of the sexes
[19], and reclaimed his barbarous subjects from a wandering and
unprovidential life, subsisting on the spontaneous produce of no
abundant soil. High above the plain, and fronting the sea, which, about
three miles distant on that side, sweeps into a bay peculiarly adapted
for the maritime enterprises of an earlier age, we still behold a cragged
and nearly perpendicular rock. In length its superficies is about eight
hundred, in breadth about four hundred, feet [20]. Below, on either side,
flow the immortal streams of the Ilissus and Cephisus. From its summit
you may survey, here, the mountains of Hymettus, Pentelicus, and, far
away, "the silver-bearing Laurium;" below, the wide plain of Attica,
broken by rocky hills--there, the islands of Salamis and Aegina, with
the opposite shores of Argolis, rising above the waters of the Saronic
Bay. On this rock the supposed Egyptian is said to have built a fortress,
and founded a city [21]; the fortress was in later times styled the
Acropolis, and the place itself, when the buildings of Athens spread far
and wide beneath its base, was still designated polis, or the CITY. By
degrees we are told that he extended, from this impregnable castle and
its adjacent plain, the limit of his realm, until it included the whole of
Attica, and perhaps Boeotia [22]. It is also related that he established
eleven other towns or hamlets, and divided his people into twelve tribes,
to each of which one of the towns was apportioned--a fortress against
foreign invasion, and a court of justice in civil disputes.
If we may trust to the glimmering light which, resting for a moment,
uncertain and confused, upon the reign of Cecrops, is swallowed up in

all the darkness of fable during those of his reputed successors,--it is to
this apocryphal personage that we must refer the elements both of
agriculture and law. He is said to have instructed the Athenians to till
the land, and to watch the produce of the seasons; to have imported
from Egypt the olive-tree, for which the Attic soil was afterward so
celebrated, and even to have navigated to Sicily and to Africa for
supplies of corn. That such advances from a primitive and savage state
were not made in a single generation, is sufficiently clear. With more
probability, Cecrops is reputed to have imposed upon the ignorance of
his subjects and the license of his followers the curb of impartial law,
and to have founded a tribunal of justice (doubtless the sole one for all
disputes), in which after times imagined to trace the origin of the
solemn Areopagus.
VIII. Passing from these doubtful speculations on the detailed
improvements effected by Cecrops in the social life of the Attic people,
I shall enter now into some examination of two subjects far more
important. The first is the religion of the Athenians in common with the
rest of Greece; and the second the origin of the institution of slavery.
The origin of religion in all countries is an inquiry of the deepest
interest and of